Image-guided interventions are saving the lives of a large number of patients where the image registration problem should indeed be considered as the most complex and complicated issue to be tackled. On the other hand, the recently huge progress in the field of machine learning made by the possibility of implementing deep neural networks on the contemporary many-core GPUs opened up a promising window to challenge with many medical applications, where the registration is not an exception. In this paper, a comprehensive review on the state-of-the-art literature known as medical image registration using deep neural networks is presented. The review is systematic and encompasses all the related works previously published in the field. Key concepts, statistical analysis from different points of view, confiding challenges, novelties and main contributions, key-enabling techniques, future directions and prospective trends all are discussed and surveyed in details in this comprehensive review. This review allows a deep understanding and insight for the readers active in the field who are investigating the state-of-the-art and seeking to contribute the future literature.
We present a meta-learning framework for interactive medical image registration. Our proposed framework comprises three components: a learning-based medical image registration algorithm, a form of user interaction that refines registration at inference, and a meta-learning protocol that learns a rapidly adaptable network initialization. This paper describes a specific algorithm that implements the registration, interaction and meta-learning protocol for our exemplar clinical application: registration of magnetic resonance (MR) imaging to interactively acquired, sparsely-sampled transrectal ult…
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；College of Life Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学生命科学与技术学院）
Deformable medical image registration plays an important role in clinical diagnosis and treatment. Recently, the deep learning (DL) based image registration methods have been widely investigated and showed excellent performance in computational speed. However, these methods cannot provide enough registration accuracy because of insufficient ability in representing both the global and local features of the moving and fixed images. To address this issue, this paper has proposed the transformer based image registration method. This method uses the distinctive transformer to extract the global and…
Wellcome/EPSRC Centre for Surgical and Interventional Sciences, University College London（伦敦大学学院威康/EPSRC外科与介入科学中心）；Centre for Medical Image Computing, University College London（伦敦大学学院医学图像计算中心）；InstaDeep（InstaDeep公司）；Department of Surgical and Interventional Engineering, King’s College London（伦敦国王学院外科与介入工程系）
This document outlines a tutorial to get started with medical image registration using the open-source package DeepReg. The basic concepts of medical image registration are discussed, linking classical methods to newer methods using deep learning. Two iterative, classical algorithms using optimisation and one learning-based algorithm using deep learning are coded step-by-step using DeepReg utilities, all with real, open-accessible, medical data.
Emory University（埃默里大学）；Winship Cancer Institute, Emory University（埃默里大学温希普癌症研究所）
This paper presents a review of deep learning (DL) based medical image registration methods. We summarized the latest developments and applications of DL-based registration methods in the medical field. These methods were classified into seven categories according to their methods, functions and popularity. A detailed review of each category was presented, highlighting important contributions and identifying specific challenges. A short assessment was presented following the detailed review of each category to summarize its achievements and future potentials. We provided a comprehensive compar…
Indian Institute of Technology Bombay（印度理工学院孟买分校）；Whirlpool（惠而浦）
We present WSSAMNet, a weakly supervised method for medical image registration. Ours is a two step method, with the first step being the computation of segmentation masks of the fixed and moving volumes. These masks are then used to attend to the input volume, which are then provided as inputs to a registration network in the second step. The registration network computes the deformation field to perform the alignment between the fixed and the moving volumes. We study the effectiveness of our technique on the BraTSReg challenge data against ANTs and VoxelMorph, where we demonstrate that our me…
University College London（伦敦大学学院）；InstaDeep；King’s College London（伦敦国王学院）
DeepReg (https://github.com/DeepRegNet/DeepReg) is a community-supported open-source toolkit for research and education in medical image registration using deep learning.
Johns Hopkins Medical Institutes（约翰斯·霍普金斯医学研究所）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；NVIDIA Corporation（英伟达公司）
Transformers have recently shown promise for medical image applications, leading to an increasing interest in developing such models for medical image registration. Recent advancements in designing registration Transformers have focused on using cross-attention (CA) to enable a more precise understanding of spatial correspondences between moving and fixed images. Here, we propose a novel CA mechanism that computes windowed attention using deformable windows. In contrast to existing CA mechanisms that require intensive computational complexity by either computing CA globally or locally with a f…
multiGradICON: A Foundation Model for Multimodal Medical Image Registration
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）；University of Salzburg（萨尔茨堡大学）；Université Gustave Eiffel（古斯塔夫·埃菲尔大学）；Brigham and Women’s Hospital（布莱根妇女医院）；ÉTS Montréal（蒙特利尔工程学院）；Boston University（波士顿大学）；Kitware Inc.（Kitware公司）
This paper presents DeepFLASH, a novel network with efficient training and inference for learning-based medical image registration. In contrast to existing approaches that learn spatial transformations from training data in the high dimensional imaging space, we develop a new registration network entirely in a low dimensional bandlimited space. This dramatically reduces the computational cost and memory footprint of an expensive training and inference. To achieve this goal, we first introduce complex-valued operations and representations of neural architectures that provide key components for …
Shiraz University of Medical Sciences（设拉子医科大学）；University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine（匹兹堡大学医学院）；UPMC Hillman Cancer Center（UPMC希尔曼癌症中心）；Shiraz University of Technology（设拉子理工大学）；Mashhad University of Medical Science（马什哈德医科大学）
In medicine, image registration is vital in image-guided interventions and other clinical applications. However, it is a difficult subject to be addressed which by the advent of machine learning, there have been considerable progress in algorithmic performance has recently been achieved for medical image registration in this area. The implementation of deep neural networks provides an opportunity for some medical applications such as conducting image registration in less time with high accuracy, playing a key role in countering tumors during the operation. The current study presents a comprehe…
University of Sao Paulo（圣保罗大学）；Faculty of Philosophy, Science and Languages of Ribeirao Preto（里贝朗普雷图哲学、科学与语言学院）；Department of Physics Applied to Medicine and Biology（医学与生物学应用物理系）
Mutual information (MI) is the standard method used in image registration and the most studied one but can diverge and produce wrong results when used in an automated manner. In this study we compared the results of the ITK Mattes MI function, used in 3D Slicer and ITK derived software solutions, and our own MICUDA Shannon and Tsallis MI functions under the translation, rotation and scale transforms in a 3D mathematical space. This comparison allows to understand why registration fails in some circumstances and how to produce a more robust automated algorithm to register medical images. Since …
Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；Johns Hopkins Medical Institutes（约翰斯·霍普金斯医学研究所）
In the last decade, convolutional neural networks (ConvNets) have dominated and achieved state-of-the-art performances in a variety of medical imaging applications. However, the performances of ConvNets are still limited by lacking the understanding of long-range spatial relations in an image. The recently proposed Vision Transformer (ViT) for image classification uses a purely self-attention-based model that learns long-range spatial relations to focus on the relevant parts of an image. Nevertheless, ViT emphasizes the low-resolution features because of the consecutive downsamplings, result i…
The establishment of image correspondence through robust image registration is critical to many clinical tasks such as image fusion, organ atlas creation, and tumor growth monitoring, and is a very challenging problem. Since the beginning of the recent deep learning renaissance, the medical imaging research community has developed deep learning based approaches and achieved the state-of-the-art in many applications, including image registration. The rapid adoption of deep learning for image registration applications over the past few years necessitates a comprehensive summary and outlook, whic…
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)（韩国科学技术院）
Deformable image registration is one of the fundamental tasks in medical imaging. Classical registration algorithms usually require a high computational cost for iterative optimizations. Although deep-learning-based methods have been developed for fast image registration, it is still challenging to obtain realistic continuous deformations from a moving image to a fixed image with less topological folding problem. To address this, here we present a novel diffusion-model-based image registration method, called DiffuseMorph. DiffuseMorph not only generates synthetic deformed images through revers…
A Symmetric Dynamic Learning Framework for Diffeomorphic Medical Image Registration
Xiangtan University（湘潭大学）；University of Strathclyde（思克莱德大学）；Nankai University（南开大学）；Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院数学与系统科学研究院）；University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology（韩国科学技术院）；The Catholic University of Korea（韩国加图立大学）；University of Ulsan College of Medicine（蔚山大学医学院）；Asan Medical Center（峨山医疗中心）；Korea Automotive Technology Institute（韩国汽车技术研究院）
Image registration is a fundamental task in medical image analysis. Recently, deep learning based image registration methods have been extensively investigated due to their excellent performance despite the ultra-fast computational time. However, the existing deep learning methods still have limitation in the preservation of original topology during the deformation with registration vector fields. To address this issues, here we present a cycle-consistent deformable image registration. The cycle consistency enhances image registration performance by providing an implicit regularization to pres…
University College London（伦敦大学学院）；University of Leeds（利兹大学）
Biomechanical modelling of soft tissue provides a non-data-driven method for constraining medical image registration, such that the estimated spatial transformation is considered biophysically plausible. This has not only been adopted in real-world clinical applications, such as the MR-to-ultrasound registration for prostate intervention of interest in this work, but also provides an explainable means of understanding the organ motion and spatial correspondence establishment. This work instantiates the recently-proposed physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) to a 3D linear elastic model for …
University of Birmingham（伯明翰大学）；University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学）；University of Warwick（华威大学）；Northeast Forestry University（东北林业大学）；Alan Turing Institute（艾伦·图灵研究所）
Due to their extreme long-range modeling capability, vision transformer-based networks have become increasingly popular in deformable image registration. We believe, however, that the receptive field of a 5-layer convolutional U-Net is sufficient to capture accurate deformations without needing long-range dependencies. The purpose of this study is therefore to investigate whether U-Net-based methods are outdated compared to modern transformer-based approaches when applied to medical image registration. For this, we propose a large kernel U-Net (LKU-Net) by embedding a parallel convolutional bl…
Queensland University of Technology（昆士兰科技大学）；CSIRO（联邦科学与工业研究组织）
The recent application of deep learning technologies in medical image registration has exponentially decreased the registration time and gradually increased registration accuracy when compared to their traditional counterparts. Most of the learning-based registration approaches considers this task as a one directional problem. As a result, only correspondence from the moving image to the target image is considered. However, in some medical procedures bidirectional registration is required to be performed. Unlike other learning-based registration, we propose a registration framework with invers…
AutoFuse: Automatic Fusion Networks for Deformable Medical Image Registration
School of Computer Science, The University of Sydney（悉尼大学计算机科学学院）；Institute of Translational Medicine, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学转化医学研究院）；Royal Prince Alfred Hospital（皇家阿尔弗雷德王子医院）
Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；National Institute on Aging（国家老龄化研究所）；National Institute of Health（美国国立卫生研究院）
The majority of deep learning (DL) based deformable image registration methods use convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to estimate displacement fields from pairs of moving and fixed images. This, however, requires the convolutional kernels in the CNN to not only extract intensity features from the inputs but also understand image coordinate systems. We argue that the latter task is challenging for traditional CNNs, limiting their performance in registration tasks. To tackle this problem, we first introduce Coordinate Translator, a differentiable module that identifies matched features between…
Disentangling Progress in Medical Image Registration: Beyond Trend-Driven Architectures towards Domain-Specific Strategies
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑技术大学）；Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML)（慕尼黑机器学习中心）；Imperial College London（伦敦帝国理工学院）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
Southeast University（东南大学）；Tencent Healthcare Co.（腾讯医疗健康有限公司）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Recently, deep-learning-based approaches have been widely studied for deformable image registration task. However, most efforts directly map the composite image representation to spatial transformation through the convolutional neural network, ignoring its limited ability to capture spatial correspondence. On the other hand, Transformer can better characterize the spatial relationship with attention mechanism, its long-range dependency may be harmful to the registration task, where voxels with too large distances are unlikely to be corresponding pairs. In this study, we propose a novel Deforme…
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology（韩国科学技术院）；University of Ulsan College of Medicine（蔚山大学医学院）；Asan Medical Center（峨山医学中心）
Medical image registration is one of the key processing steps for biomedical image analysis such as cancer diagnosis. Recently, deep learning based supervised and unsupervised image registration methods have been extensively studied due to its excellent performance in spite of ultra-fast computational time compared to the classical approaches. In this paper, we present a novel unsupervised medical image registration method that trains deep neural network for deformable registration of 3D volumes using a cycle-consistency. Thanks to the cycle consistency, the proposed deep neural networks can t…
From Model Based to Learned Regularization in Medical Image Registration: A Comprehensive Review
School of Computation, Information and Technology, Technical University of Munich (TUM)（慕尼黑工业大学计算、信息与技术学院）；Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML)（慕尼黑机器学习中心）；Institute of Machine Learning in Biomedical Imaging, Helmholtz Munich（亥姆霍兹慕尼黑生物医学成像机器学习研究所）；Department of Computing, Imperial College London（伦敦帝国理工学院计算机系）；School of Biomedical Engineering and Imaging Sciences, King’s College London（伦敦国王学院生物医学工程与影像科学学院）；School of Medicine, Klinikum rechts der Isar, Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学右岸医院医学院）
Image registration aims to establish spatial correspondence across pairs, or groups of images, and is a cornerstone of medical image computing and computer-assisted-interventions. Currently, most deep learning-based registration methods assume that the desired deformation fields are globally smooth and continuous, which is not always valid for real-world scenarios, especially in medical image registration (e.g. cardiac imaging and abdominal imaging). Such a global constraint can lead to artefacts and increased errors at discontinuous tissue interfaces. To tackle this issue, we propose a weakly…
FMIR, a foundation model-based Image Registration Framework for Robust Image Registration
School of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics（人工智能与机器人学院）；Hunan University（湖南大学）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering（电气与计算机工程系）；Cornell University（康奈尔大学）
Search-MIND: Training-Free Multi-Modal Medical Image Registration
Lab for Uncertainty in Data and Decision Making (LUCID), Nottingham Biomedical Research Centre (BRC), School of Medicine, University of Nottingham, UK（英国诺丁汉大学医学院诺丁汉生物医学研究中心（BRC）数据与决策不确定性实验室（LUCID））
Deep Learning in Medical Image Registration: Magic or Mirage?
Computer and Information Science（计算机与信息科学学院）；Electrical and Systems Engineering（电气与系统工程学院）；Radiology（放射学系）；Penn Image Computing and Science Laboratory（宾夕法尼亚图像计算与科学实验室）
The recent application of deep learning in various areas of medical image analysis has brought excellent performance gains. In particular, technologies based on deep learning in medical image registration can outperform traditional optimisation-based registration algorithms both in registration time and accuracy. However, the U-net based architectures used in most of the image registration frameworks downscale the data, which removes global information and affects the deformation. In this paper, we present a densely connected convolutional architecture for deformable image registration. Our pr…
Rigid slice-to-volume registration is a challenging task, which finds application in medical imaging problems like image fusion for image guided surgeries and motion correction for volume reconstruction. It is usually formulated as an optimization problem and solved using standard continuous methods. In this paper, we discuss how this task be formulated as a discrete labeling problem on a graph. Inspired by previous works on discrete estimation of linear transformations using Markov Random Fields (MRFs), we model it using a pairwise MRF, where the nodes are associated to the rigid parameters, …
Medical image registration is a fundamental and critical task in medical image analysis. With the rapid development of deep learning, convolutional neural networks (CNN) have dominated the medical image registration field. Due to the disadvantage of the local receptive field of CNN, some recent registration methods have focused on using transformers for non-local registration. However, the standard Transformer has a vast number of parameters and high computational complexity, which causes Transformer can only be applied at the bottom of the registration models. As a result, only coarse informa…
University College London（伦敦大学学院）；Verdure Imaging, Inc.（Verdure成像公司）；Queen’s University（女王大学）
Free Point Transformer (FPT) has been proposed as a data-driven, non-rigid point set registration approach using deep neural networks. As FPT does not assume constraints based on point vicinity or correspondence, it may be trained simply and in a flexible manner by minimizing an unsupervised loss based on the Chamfer Distance. This makes FPT amenable to real-world medical imaging applications where ground-truth deformations may be infeasible to obtain, or in scenarios where only a varying degree of completeness in the point sets to be aligned is available. To test the limit of the corresponden…
Ryerson University（瑞尔森大学）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Institute for Biomedical Engineering, Science and Technology (iBEST)（生物医学工程、科学与技术研究所（iBEST））
We propose FlowReg, a deep learning-based framework for unsupervised image registration for neuroimaging applications. The system is composed of two architectures that are trained sequentially: FlowReg-A which affinely corrects for gross differences between moving and fixed volumes in 3D followed by FlowReg-O which performs pixel-wise deformations on a slice-by-slice basis for fine tuning in 2D. The affine network regresses the 3D affine matrix based on a correlation loss function that enforces global similarity. The deformable network operates on 2D image slices based on the optical flow netw…
On the Degrees of Freedom of Gridded Control Points in Learning-Based Medical Image Registration
UCL Hawkes Institute（UCL霍克斯研究所；医学物理与生物医学工程系，伦敦大学学院）；Department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, University College London（医学成像中心，医学系，伦敦大学学院）；Centre for Medical Imaging, Division of Medicine, University College London（外科与介入科学系，伦敦大学学院）；Division of Surgery and Interventional Science, University College London（癌症研究所，泌尿科，UCL医院，伦敦大学学院）；Cancer Institute, Urology Department, UCL Hospital, University College London（放射科，帝国理工医疗）；Radiology Department, Imperial College Healthcare
Image registration is a fundamental building block for various applications in medical image analysis. To better explore the correlation between the fixed and moving images and improve registration performance, we propose a novel deep learning network, Co-Attention guided Registration Network (CAR-Net). CAR-Net employs a co-attention block to learn a new representation of the inputs, which drives the registration of the fixed and moving images. Experiments on UK Biobank cardiac cine-magnetic resonance image data demonstrate that CAR-Net obtains higher registration accuracy and smoother deforma…
We introduce an end-to-end deep-learning framework for 3D medical image registration. In contrast to existing approaches, our framework combines two registration methods: an affine registration and a vector momentum-parameterized stationary velocity field (vSVF) model. Specifically, it consists of three stages. In the first stage, a multi-step affine network predicts affine transform parameters. In the second stage, we use a Unet-like network to generate a momentum, from which a velocity field can be computed via smoothing. Finally, in the third stage, we employ a self-iterable map-based vSVF …
Deformable image registration, i.e., the task of aligning multiple images into one coordinate system by non-linear transformation, serves as an essential preprocessing step for neuroimaging data. Recent research on deformable image registration is mainly focused on improving the registration accuracy using multi-stage alignment methods, where the source image is repeatedly deformed in stages by a same neural network until it is well-aligned with the target image. Conventional methods for multi-stage registration can often blur the source image as the pixel/voxel values are repeatedly interpola…
Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；Cranfield University（克兰菲尔德大学）；Science and Technology on Space Physics Laboratory（空间物理重点实验室）
Augmented reality technology based on image registration is becoming increasingly popular for the convenience of pre-surgery preparation and medical education. This paper focuses on the registration of forearm images and digital anatomical models. Due to the difference in texture features of forearm multi-modal images, this paper proposes a forearm feature representation curve (FFRC) based on structure compliant multi-modal image registration framework (FAM) for the forearm.
ConKeD++ -- Improving descriptor learning for retinal image registration: A comprehensive study of contrastive losses
Instituto de Investigacion Biomédica de A Coruña (INIBIC)（拉科鲁尼亚生物医学研究所）；Universidade da Coruña（拉科鲁尼亚大学）；Departamento de Ciencias de la Computación y Tecnologías de la Información（计算机科学与信息技术系）；Grupo VARPA（VARPA团队）
3-D image registration, which involves aligning two or more images, is a critical step in a variety of medical applications from diagnosis to therapy. Image registration is commonly performed by optimizing an image matching metric as a cost function. However, this task is challenging due to the non-convex nature of the matching metric over the plausible registration parameter space and insufficient approaches for a robust optimization. As a result, current approaches are often customized to a specific problem and sensitive to image quality and artifacts. In this paper, we propose a completely …
